Afer the Water Revolution

A belated post of my article about Bolivians' struggles to deliver on the promises they made to themselves during two massive water revolutions in the past seven years. Hopefully, the story sheds some light on how much trouble the Evo Morales government is having meeting the needs of its constituents in the face of huge obstacles -- originating at home, and also abroad.

The privatization of Semapa was an intolerable insult. The Bechtel subsidiary got control of the municipality’s entire water system, including the city’s aquifer. Its contract contained a guaranteed profit margin of at least 15 per cent, indexed to US inflation rates. The company had intended to charge tariffs on all water consumed by everyone in Cochabamba—even if it came from neighbourhood wells built by consumer cooperatives whose construction was paid for by users and international aid. The subsidiary’s start-up capital was US$12,000—laughable, given that privatization had been sold as the only way to generate massive investments. During the few months the Bechtel subsidiary was in charge, water rates were hiked in inexplicable ways, with many users facing raises in the neighbourhood of 200 per cent.

Beyond the grotesque particulars of the Bechtel deal, the rate hikes exemplify the fundamental problem of privatization policy: it passes the cost of infrastructure expansion on to consumers who simply cannot afford it.

Read on.

Black Superman runs for office -- or a profile of Keith Sweeney, running against an incumbent in Ward 12

Today's NOW Magazine has my profile of Ward 12 city council candidate Keith Sweeney, a guy who actually is a man of the people he's hoping to represent:

Sweeney lives with his younger brother in a basement flat off Jane and Lawrence where one wall is lined with pairs of his size-15 boots and basketball shoes, and Superman comic books, merchandize and posters set the tone.

"Growing up in a five-person family in a two-bedroom apartment makes me more sympathetic to what other people are going through," he says.

Click here for the rest.

Of course, the Sun finds a way to paint his pro-developer opponent Di Giorgio as a softie progressive in an article detailing Fantino's ouster. But we know better.

Le Monde is watching

Le Canada veut abandonner le protocole de Kyoto en ménageant ses plus gros pollueurs

A entendre la ministre canadienne de l'environnement, Rona Ambrose, jeudi 19 octobre, on aurait pu croire en la volonté du gouvernement conservateur canadien, en place depuis février, de faire mieux que le protocole de Kyoto.

Mais son projet de loi sur la qualité de l'air, "pièce maîtresse" d'un nouveau plan vert, laisse plutôt un goût amer aux écologistes et aux partis d'opposition. Non seulement, affirment-ils à l'unisson, enterre-t-il Kyoto en balayant les engagements canadiens en matière de réduction des émissions de gaz à effet de serre (GES) (- 6 % d'ici à 2012 par rapport au niveau de 1990), mais encore ouvre-t-il grand la porte à une accélération des émissions (qui ont déjà augmenté de 32 %), pour ne pas freiner la croissance économique. Au banc des accusés : de grandes entreprises du secteur énergétique et deux provinces (Alberta et Ontario) responsables de 77 % des rejets.

Migrant carbon

I'm doing background research for a story on migrant workers with my colleague Jeff Carolin right now, and yesterday we went to Branford to see a UFCW-funded support centre. Much of the food produced in Ontario is actually planted, picked, etc, by agricultural workers from Mexico and the Caribbean through the SAWP program. There are about 18,000 such workers in Canada, of whom about 16,000 work in Ontario. They fly in for several months a year and at the end of their work period are flown back home. Obviously, conditions are often pretty grim. What occurred to me just the other minute, though, is that the fact that they're flown in really changes the way we calculate how much carbon it 'costs' to produce local food. The 100-mile diet is based on the idea that locally-grown food requires less carbon to be transported here than from California, Spain, South Africa, or wherever else it might be grown. But to what extent does flying in the labour change the equation? Could it possibly even tip it to another preference? Surely, it mitigates the gains. When George Monbiot's book comes out tomorrow with plenty of figures, maybe I'll be inspired to actually do some of the math. But probably not.

oops

So rabble.ca did end up publishing my NDP piece, though as careful readers will note, it's a slightly different version from the one below. Points for whoever can figure out which was the most recent edit.

Naive, idealistic young man delivers late, angry rant about Jack Layton and the NDP

Their hands were red from clapping

In an episode of The West Wing, President Barlet’s chief of staff tells us in reverent tones that his boss ‘loves the podium, he sees it as a genuine opportunity to change minds.’ These days it’s pretty clear that Jack Layton has other plans for the podium.

On September 10, during a one-hour speech, Jack closed the NDP’s largest policy convention since 1987 by failing to refer a single time to the decisions of the party’s grassroots. He boasted about policies that he would be unrolling in the coming months, while saying nothing about the policies unrolled that weekend by delegates in the very hall where he now addressed them.

Not that this bothered anyone. Delegates showered him with over a dozen standing ovations during his speech after handing him a 92 per cent approval vote.

It shouldn’t be crazy to imagine that the leader of parliament’s smallest party, who now says he wants to win the next election, take the need for persuasion seriously. And yet the hour-long speech was a brazen attack on the art of politics. Jack’s sentences were short and vacuous, like a row of empty shot glasses.

Seeing him talk like this wasn’t just offensive, it was saddening: he reminded me of King Kong chained to the stage on Broadway. In fairness, when after scolding the Tories he turned his attention to the Liberal leadership race, he seemed a man transformed. The suffocating sanctimony—surely a symptom of boredom—vanished instantly and a mischievous, then beaming smile crept on to his face. He shredded Ignatieff and Rae before complimenting Dion’s integrity and intelligence, ‘and therefore [he’s] almost certain not to be elected leader of the Liberal Party.’ Moments later, the weight of his chains dragged him down again. If the delegates hadn’t been so busy standing, sitting, and standing again, all the while clapping furiously, they might have noticed and called the Humane Society.

Instead, we got a Harper-esque 5-point plan. Afghanistan, the green economy, looking after seniors, making life cheaper for working Canadians and all things children. This will be achieved, Jack tells us, ‘Carefully. Prudently. And one practical step at a time.’ Never mind the plan itself—meek and unfocussed—how a party at 16% in the polls will actually get this done is hard to imagine. Especially when you look at what’s missing.

Let’s play the Ven Diagram game. What’s the democratic reform that would automatically produce a dramatic jump in the NDP’s national presence, simply by virtue of fairer math? What has been, on and off, one of the NDP’s principal policy planks over the past several years? What has Jack called a top priority of NDP negotiations with other parties in a minority parliament? And what did Jack not mention a single time in his speech, never mind making it one of the NDP’s five priorities for the next election?

Proportional representation. It was a strange omission on the very weekend that a citizens’ assembly in Ontario was being inaugurated, an assembly whose sole purpose is to figure out whether we need to fix the province’s electoral system, and if so, how.

It was a strange omission at a convention where the message was broadcast loud and clear that the NDP has decided once and for all that it wants to be more than an opposition party and is ready to play for all the marbles. I can imagine three possibilities. First, the party leadership thinks it can win Canada like Bob Rae won Ontario, by sneaking up the middle in an unprecedented number of three-way races. This would only take a little over 30 per cent of the vote and a dump-truck-load of luck. Slightly stranger things have happened. Second, they don’t think they can win, and are only pretending to be serious about taking power. Third, what are these guys thinking?

This is the same brain trust that’s decided not to talk about economic policy, despite recent studies (TD Bank, StatsCan) showing that salaries for Canadian workers have barely budged in twenty-five years. That’s a long time and it’s a big problem. You might even say it’s by far the top issue for a party that boasts about ‘Putting Working People First’. (Ironically, Bob Rae also had zero economic ideas when he fluked into power in 1990.)

On a host of issues, the NDP is taking bizarre positions. The party will likely vote with the Conservatives on raising the age of consent from 14 to 16 (changing a 25-year-old law). They campaigned in favour of minimum sentences against the expert opinion of criminologists and the views of the party’s own base. And despite the Conservative win in the last election, they still seem intellectually and emotionally fixated on fighting the Liberals.

On his blog, jameslaxer.com, York University political scientist James Laxer identified the NDP’s ‘strategic dilemna’: How do you go after the Tories when this means voters, choosing the lesser evil, will flee to the Liberals? Hence their current strategy of going easy on Harper, weakly accusing him of being ‘wrong on the issues’, and focusing their attack on what they believe to be their real enemy, the Liberals. Since Laxer thinks—and he’s surely correct—that Harper is the most reactionary Prime Minister in Canadian history, it follows that the NDP’s current obligation is to show Canadians how reactionary and out of touch with their values Harper is, even if this wins them fewer seats than nibbling away at the Liberals. (If Gerard Kennedy, Rae or Dion wins the Liberal leadership, this will be an even greater dilemma.)

Laxer argues that ‘the NDP must earn the trust of Canadians over time that they will never shy away from speaking out on behalf of working people and the nation. That is the road to electing the first people’s government in Canadian history.’

Is Laxer right? It’s impossible to say. What I do know with certainty is that Jack, at least two years ago, agreed with him.

When he came to McGill University one cold winter day to speak to an auditorium overflowing with students, he delivered a long speech without notes. Its focus was poverty. I was in the audience and sceptical. But did he ever win me, and the rest of us, over. Smart, funny, genuine: exactly what you want from a politician but are afraid you’re never going to get. The equivalent of a giant ape destroying three T-Rexes to save a girl. He said that when Tommy Douglas stood up against the War Measures Act in 1970, he thought, ‘this is a guy who doesn’t want to win the next election’. But he was so impressed with Douglas’s eloquence and principled stance that he joined the NDP.

In Quebec City, though, it was the hollow man, the one those of us who usually see him on TV have gotten used to. Closing a policy convention by pretending it wasn’t a policy convention. Timid and rigid. Speaking in a lifeless, imitative language designed neither to offend nor interrupt the applause. Critics on the right accuse Jack of wanting to move Canada in the wrong direction—too far left, too anti-American, too downtown Toronto. On the left, it’s a distorted mirror: on too many issues, he’s too moderate. But both imply that Jack wants to move the party somewhere.

I’m pretty sure now that such attacks miss the point. The NDP leadership doesn’t have a clue what it wants. Jack’s admirable opposition to the Afghanistan mission—driven in fact by the party’s grassroots—only obscures this bigger problem. The NDP can’t be bold, specific or intellectually challenging if it’s got nothing to say. Taking Jack out of his message box would help, but it can’t be the solution because the message box is the symptom, not the sickness.

Superficially, the history of the American and Canadian neo-cons over the past quarter-century is the history of brilliant campaigning. (The classic example is the transformation of the obviously progressive ‘estate tax’ into the cringe-inducing ‘death tax’.) But at a deeper level it’s a story of intellectual daring, the formation of a semi-coherent, semi-revolutionary idea of what society should be, and developing a strategy to bring about radical changes to how we live our lives.

The federal NDP, meanwhile, has found itself playing a progressively duller, more defensive game that reminds you of 14-year-olds glumly trying to master the neutral zone trap. Their political ambition has been reduced to keeping the last crumbs of social democracy from being swept off the table. The federal NDP is Canada’s most conservative political party—their rhetoric the most tepid, their ideas the most inoffensive, their proposed policies the most backward-looking.

The party’s base, judging by its massive resolutions binder, is bursting with ideas, good and bad. At the very least, the role of the leadership is to chisel and compliment these, then give them shape, cohesion, and a magic gloss. The kind of architectural vision that takes just isn’t there.

The New Democratic Party is 45 years old and completely adrift. The name used to be a useful one because it could mean anything: it reflected just the kind of forward-looking openness that the NDP then represented. Today, it’s useful to the party’s leadership for the opposite reason. It works because it conceals—if only barely—that in 2006, the label New Democrat means nothing at all.

I met a bunch of brilliant, inspiring young people at the convention. Keith Sweeney, a 25-year-old running for Toronto city council in Ward 12, is one of them, a reason to believe in the future of this party. But most of the smart, young, dedicated Canadian activists I know didn’t come to Quebec City. It’s too bad. They missed the chance to network with people as extraordinary as them; two great speeches, by Jane Doe and Stephen Lewis; and one hell of a bender.

--







I should point out, on a slightly different note, that I thought the convention itself was extremely well organized (by Ira Dubinsky).

Maude Barlow in Bolivia

Um, I haven't been on this blogger thing for so long, I can barely remember how to use it. I got back from Bolivia recently and have published my first article about something that happened there, a visit by Maude Barlow for a historic meeting. The story appeared in the Star a week ago Sunday, and begins like this:

Wearing bright sneakers and a long beige overcoat, her hair sprinkled with confetti, Canadian activist Maude Barlow is touring one of Bolivia's poorest communities.

At 4,300 metres altitude and flanked by rugged Andean peaks, Villa Solidaridad is home to 100 Indian families. Their cluster of adobe dwellings sits on the edge of El Alto, the sprawling city above La Paz, Bolivia's capital.

On Villa Solidaridad's northern side is a privately owned treatment plant that supplies water to El Alto and La Paz. A pipe from the plant spews waste water onto the villagers' side of a chain-link fence.

Until recently, the people of Villa Solidaridad did their laundry with this water and some children became deathly sick drinking it. The villagers had little choice, being among the 1.2 billion people in the world without access to clean water.

"When we bathed in the water, it burned our skin," says Carlos Ortiz Silva, the community's elected leader.

For the full story, click here.

It didn't fit in the published story, but I wanted to say that this is was an incredible event because the meeting I describe in the article--between Barlow, Bolivia's water minister and Norway's minister of Development Cooperation--could be the first step in the creation of a UN Convention declaring that water is a human right and must be delivered by not-for-profit public systems. This could be the first positive victory in the anti-globalization fight, by which I mean, the first time the movement has put up a public-sector alternative to the neo-liberal model and had it legalized at the highest international level.

The story in Bolivia, I think, adds another dimension of fascinating, because social movements there are helping create a new "public" model. When I left it was still unclear what this would look like. But in the coming years, in Cochabamba and La Paz-El Alto, it's certain that the social movements in the water fight will be creating public water utilities with a heavy amount of participatory social management, to a degree no one can yet anticipate. In this and other matters, Bolivians have explicitly rejected the old statist model that we're all occasionally so embarrassed to defend. And if South America's poorest country can do this while instigating a radical reform at the United Nations, well, that's pretty incredible.

On October 11, a more in-depth story (by yours truly) on what's happened to the water situation in Cochabamba since the infamous 2000 water war will appear in Corporate Knights' annual water issue.

Water, you know. It's the new black.

..

Also, vanity. Here's a picture of me talking to some of the villagers of Villa Solidaridad, and right to my left Oscar Olivera, an enormous prince of a man.




(photo by my friend Boris Rios)

Ignatieff: yet more noxious macho manliness

Though I'm meant to be following Bolivian politics, I just can't seem to get away from Michael Ignatieff's awesome phallic rhetoric.

To wit, a quotation I just stumbled on from a two-week old story on Canada.com. From a section of the story where he's boasting that a number of federal MPs said they supported his leadership bid:

Ignatieff said snagging the support of MPs is "tremendously important."

"These are people who've been in the battlefields. These are people who've taken the incoming fire. These are people who believe I'll be a good guy in a fox hole. So I'm extremely pleased to have their support,'' he told reporters.

I mean, we all know that being elected as an MP is tought work, but is knocking on doors really as bad as getting trench foot?

Now, to prove this is more than just a random occurrence, here is more of his strange fascination with his warrior alter-eg, this time from the actual campaign trail, exerpted from a blog post I never posted:

At a fundraiser in Toronto called Meet Our Champion (for which he skipped the televised candidates debate for his Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding), he gave a speech replete with bizarrely macho quotes about winning back Quebec. These are reported in an article by the excellent Toronto Star reporter Linda Diebel, who somehow got in even though the media weren't invited.
As she paraphrased some of the remarks, to be clear I will quote straight from the article and put MI's words are in red:

Michael Ignatieff warned that Canada is facing a national unity crisis in which "we need troops, warriors and chieftains" ready for the political battle over Quebec.[...]"Young federalist Quebecers exist but they need a champion ... to give them the courage to speak," he said. In watching the English debates Monday night, he had seen in Martin "a man of tremendous, almost physical toughness. I have tremendous respect for his endurance... Everyone in this room needs to give this brave man full support."

It's all just too creepy. Why on earth is he talking about his puffed out, geriatric party leader's physical toughness and endurance? Why are young federalist leaders chomping for a frothing viking chieftain?

"Michael Ignatieff: Apostle of He-manitarianism" tries to puzzle some of it out, but some of the geopolitics are pretty dubious. I'll also point out that though I can't find the source, I'm positive he recently told a reporter to emphasize that he's not some intellectual flake, he's been shot at! (Alledgedly in Bosnia.)

I just think it's hard to tell whether Iggy is overcompensating for his obvious meterosexual image as a Harvard prof and BBC arts correspondent for strategic reasons, or whether he actually fantasizes about being one of those steel-nut seargents from Platoon or Full Metal Jacket.

Monbiot defends Morales, Bush says he's undemocratic

Reuters reports Bush saying that democracy is eroding in Venezuela and Bolivia.

Meanwhile, Guardian journalist George Monbiot rips a hole into attacks on Morales for nationalizing oil:

So on the one hand you have a man (Morales) who has kept his promises by regaining control over the money from the hydrocarbon industry, in order to use it to help the poor. On the other you have a man (Derby, president of Chad) who has broken his promises by regaining control over the money from the hydrocarbon industry, in order to buy guns. The first man is vilified as irresponsible, childish and capricious. The second man is left to get on with it. Why? Well Deby’s actions don’t hurt the oil companies. Morales’s do. When Blair and Rice and the Times and all the other apologists for undemocratic power say “the people”, they mean the corporations. The reason they hate Morales is that when he says “the people” he means the people.

For this quote to really make sense, you have to read the whole article.

More gas: Spanish reaction, some American press with a quasi-rebuttal...and my hesitant optimism

In an earlier post I wondered how grassroots Spanish socialists would react to their socialist government's own somewhat hostile reaction to Bolivia's gas moves. According to a story in leftwing Bolivian news web site Bolpress.com:

En una de las primeras reacciones de la sociedad civil española ante las actitudes del gobierno español, representantes de diversos colectivos y organizaciones se concentraron ayer viernes frente a la representación diplomática de Bolivia en Madrid, y entregaron una carta al embajador en la que expresan su apoyo y solidaridad con la nacionalización del petróleo y el gas en ese país.

(Roughly translated) In one of Spanish civil society's first reactions to the Spanish government's position, representatives of various collectives and organizations assembled on Friday in front of Bolivia's diplomatic station in Madrid and sent a letter to the embassador in which they expressed their support and solidarity with Bolivia's nationalisation of its oil and gas.

Meanwhile, the NYT has another story on Bolivia's nationalisation that, typically, refers to the idea that previous privatisation efforts have failed to bring prosperity to the country, but offers no evidence and fails to interview a single social movement leader. (I know I keep harping on this fact. It's key because Evo Morales and his political party MAS rose to power not on the strength of partisan tactics or strategy, but broad-based social movement activism, much of it in rejection of previous government gas policy.) Also, a decent piece from the Christian Science Monitor on Lula's difficult position balancing domestic politics and international left stuff.

As I and the Time story I link to in the previous post suggest, an 'expert' quoted by CSM thinks Chavez's influence on SA geopolitics may (now) be greater than Lula's:

"I think that Lula and Chávez have disputed the leadership role in South America and this was a defeat for Lula," says Rogerio Schmitt, a political analyst with the Tendencia consulting firm.

"That doesn't mean we are seeing an irreversible shift to the left. There won't be a domino effect, other countries won't take the same measures. I think the radical left won a battle but they have not won the war."

Also note said expert's implicit panic (despite his uncanny certainty about other countries' future actions) and reference to the 'radical left'--one that 'nationalizes' oil by hiking taxes and increasing its share in various other companies, typically from 48% to 51%. I suppose Cuba, on this scale, would be classified as radical-radical-radical-radical left.

Finally, check out Jim Shultz's cautious and thoughtful initial reaction to the announcement ("...as always with the complicated gas issue, 'the devil remains in the details'.") and then his raging reaction to unbalanced media coverage, including the commentary of typically moronic Thomas Friedman on CNN. More substantial analysis is promised on the Dem Centre blog. Meanwhile, Shultz, concludes:

Make what you will of the Bolivia decree this week but one thing is clear, the message. If it is under our ground it is ours and if foreign companies want a piece of the action they had better be prepared for real negotiations, not giveaways behind closed doors.

Also, on Saturday night, at a small meetings of ecologists, we got a pretty thorough rundown on the actual nationalization decree from a lawyer who knows his shit. The basic summary is that much of what's in the decree is actually restatement of old law, while other aspects are not exactly overspilling with legal legitimacy--in both cases, the decree is more than anything a political document. Nonetheless, the decree does represent substantial change, especially insofar as the government takes over the chain of production, marketing and sale, including setting the price of sale and amount to be extracted.

So, I think at this point, with the measures promised in this decree, if the gov't and YPFB--the state hydrocarbon company--do manage to get their shit together, there is the likelihood of pretty substantial positive change.

Time Magazine on the Money??!!

In an article I found online, Time Magazine appears to have been reading my mind. (At least, that's my meglomaniac's interpretation...). Posted today, and responding to the four-leader summit that ended with a warm endorsement of Evo's 'nationalisation' plan (AP summary), the article suggests that Chavez's illusions of uniting the Latin American left may be becoming less bluster than reality:

As he walked into a Puerto Iguazu meeting on Thursday, Chavez remarked that Latin America has "been trying to integrate for 200 years in and [the U.S.] has been trying to break us up for 200 years." It was typical Chavez bluster. But if he can prove his mediator mettle this week, he could make it much harder for anyone to thwart his hemispheric ambitions in the coming years.

In less hysterical terms (I want to be clear that I'm not endorsing much of the 'content' of said article beyond the basic insight), Chavez seems to have succeeded in becoming the most important international statesman in South America. After all, Chavez had little to do with Bolivia's decision insofar as it buys no Bolivian gas and has no important investments in that industry. Yet within the week, Venezuela has promised to help Bolivia achieve energy sovereignty with money and expertise, and more importantly at least for now, Chavez arranged a meeting with the presidents that were affected and seems to have ensured that Morales's decision be respected. (In all fairness, I did read in an Argentine source at some point that it was Kirchner's efforts that made it work...) And they used to say Lula would be the S American point guy.

Couple interesting NYT stories

From the Times, now recovered from the nasty surprise, one general update on the gas situation and another on reaction in Brazil to Lula's apparently soft reaction to nationalisation. Still zero reporting on reaction from Bolivia's social movements, though.

Meanwhile, a bunch of stories likely to come soon about the results of a four-way emergency summit today in Argentina featuring Chavez, Evo, Kirshner and Lula. Chavez has definitely leveraged himself into a regional power-broker now, and seems to be throwing his support behind Bolivia.

I wonder if Spanish socialists who believe in what their party's named after, or other left militants, will pressure their PM Zapatero to respect Bolivia's economic sovereignty and lay off on the threats. As someone pointed out to me today, Aren't 500 years of exploitation enough?

English-language overview of 'nationalization'

Local (i.e., Cochabamba-based) Democracy Centre researcher Gretchen Gordon has written an excellent overview of the implications of Monday's announcement that Bolivia will 'nationalize' its gas industry for Upside Down World (which is also asking for funding help...). Excerpt:

...many see the government’s plan as the key to much needed economic development and as a means of recovering state sovereignty in a country that historically has been managed in the interests of foreign capital. “The recovery of the oil and gas resources is what Bolivia is counting on to be able to develop,” explains Roberto Delis, an YPFB employee participating in the refinery “takeover.” “Now those resources are going to be returned so that they serve Bolivia.”

--SNIP--

Many aspects of the decree, however, remain to be determined and its true impact will depend on the details of its implementation over the coming months.

Local media laugh
Today, on the cover of one local paper, Opinión, a blurb advertising in-depth coverage of the 'nationalization of gas' ended with a couple of bullet points, one of which read: 'Experts say it's not a nationalisation at all'. Obviously, the editors don't agree.

Mainstream papers caught with pants down

Everyone was shocked by Evo Morales's announcement yesterday that Bolivia is 'nationalising' its gas industry. 'Nationalising' in quotes because in some cases the government will be taking over 51% of shares in various aspects of the industry, and in others raising taxes foreign companies must pay to 82% of revenues.

This was a gigantic surprise, a secret kept even from almost everyone in the government. There were no leaks. Note that this is the most important announcement out of Bolivia since Evo won election and the NYT story was filed from Rio de Janeiro, the Miami Herald story from Lima, and the Houston Chronicle story that ran in the Toronto Star from Bogota. Also note that all stories only quote experts opposed to the plan and that none quote social movement actors in Bolivia where, in fact, many on the hard left are deriding this as a false nationalization. This LA Times story is the most informative I've read in English so far, though it too fails to capture the reaction of the Boli social movement leaders or participants who have, in the past few years, made 'nationalization' almost an inevitability.

Here's a brief story from Prensa Latina in English with some details on the ramifications of the new law, and this page from Bolivian daily La Razon, if you look on the right, contains a wealth of reporting on the announcement, though in Spanish. I haven't yet come accross anything in depth and reasonably impartial in English, but will post if I do, and feel free to send something along.

Meanwhile, for background on the Boli gas situation in general, this Democracy Centre blog post gives a very brief overview and links to a solid, preliminary analysis of the situation up until recently. Also, for more general background on oil issues in general, also see this Dem Centre post.

You can also read about Spain's proudly socialist government discovery that it may have more in common with Christopher Colombus than Che Guevara as it moves to shield a Spanish oil company.

I'll be writing more about this later today or early tomorrow.

More Bolis

Since last update, I have—believe it or not—met more Bolis, all thanks to the gravy train of goodwill left behind by Yuill Hebert when he was in Bolivia (he’s got an excellent essay in the book I’m still editing).

In El Alto lives Fabiola, who has a tiny, adorable baby, a friendly husband, and a job in a medical clinic. I went there to meet her and it was packed with people of all ages, including many adorable babies. The road to the centre from the Plaza 16 de Julio appeared to be a mean-spirited joke. Structurally, it was a boulevard, with a couple lanes on each side of a wide median, and sidewalks on each side too. There weren’t many people or cars about. The median’s surface was a sort of combo of packed dirt overtop something one level beneath proper paving. Right down the middle, at irregular intervals of ten to fifteen meters, small groups of indigenous people were clustered under a tarpaulin around a couple bags of potatoes or boxes of fruit. Running through the sidewalk were veins of stones you did your best to avoid walking on.

In the medical centre, one poster showed an indigenous woman in bowler hat and shawl holding her hand over her mouth and read, “If you cough for more than two weeks…you could have tuberculosis.” Grim. Another read, “Having a son when you’re an adolescent not only deprives of your freedom. It also deprives you of your dreams.”

Rocio had told me that when mothers here have tons of kids, it’s said that it’s a zampoña family. (Look at the picture (and visualize upside down); think of the kids in descending order of height; Margolis, this one's for you.)



Fabiola took me out to lunch for chicken, fries and plantain and we talked about her family and living in El Alto. It’s cold, but at even higher altitude than La Paz, the sun burns.

When I went back to the centre to meet her on Saturday for a night on the town, the joke was on me. Not only was I fabulously late, but the same dusty, abandoned boulevard couldn’t have been more lively. Now the median was almost overstuffed with vendors, sidewalk street food vendors crowded pedestrians onto the street where they dodged healthy traffic, and the chipper music form the plaza filtered the length of the two blocks down to the medical centre. It was a Saturday night and the people were out in force. Looking at my notebook, where I’d jotted down about El Alto, “vast, wind-swept, empty, no-frills” I felt like an idiot. Well, at least, an idiot redeemed.

After stopping in at a wedding and eating dinner (Fabiola’s husband is training to do layout in periodicals, which is hot), we went down to La Paz and ended up in a club-cum-bar that looked about like a rec hall filled with tables, plus colourful lights and a disco ball. Also, a man with a mic circulated, sometimes interviewing dancers, sometimes singing along. I was there with Fabiola, her husband Marcelo, her brother Franz, Franz’s best friend Rafael, and Rafael’s wife, whose name I’ve obviously forgotten, which is obviously very shameful.

We drank beer and danced. When dancing music came on, people would line up in two long rows and dance with the person en face. Luckily, Fabiola took me by the arm and implored a bunch of girls to dance with me (I’m sure my charm was enhanced by blushing and sweating), until one poor woman agreed. I think a three-legged dog would have done better than I did. But she graciously giggled and showed me the steps. Actually, she was clearly showing me things much more complicated than anyone else was doing. When the music changed and people sat down, she said she’d be right back and I never saw her again.

Meantime, I got to talking with Rafael. It turns out he’s a salesman who loves classic rock (more The Police than Zeppelin…) and used to be a DJ. Also, like the general crowd, he seemed to really like the outrageously sentimental, epic Latin pop that was playing for way too long. I tried to explain that in Canada, these sorts of songs are usually reserved for the end of the night, but this only won me curious, slightly angry looks. Next we discussed me being the first atheist he’d ever met, and his wife told me she also used to feel that way until, logically, she found Jesus Christ. But they were very respectful. I said I found adequate mystery and cause for faith in nature and art, but I’m not sure they were convinced. Then, just as a I was thinking Rafael was well-meaning but a bit of a philistine, he gave me a long, nuanced appraisal of Evo’s strengths and flaws, repeating something I’ve heard a lot recently to the effect that the president has arrived in office a bit unprepared, but everyone has to learn new things in life. And besides, the old system was so corrupt, MAS’s victory represented genuine and incredibly positive change.

I’m not quite sure what the transition was (something about the four elements) but we next moved on to Greek philosophy. Rafael’s favourite thinker is Heraclitus, and his favourite quote that you can’t step in the same river twice. This was a real bonding moment, since I feel the exact same way about Heraclitus and the river. But alas, the conversation couldn’t go on forever.

(You guessed it: Heraclitus)

Franz had come up to me and said, “Daniel, let’s dance. I’ve found two women.” This time was more successful, and I got to dance and talk with Patricia, a nurse from Oruro (in the south). I didn’t tell her she had the same name as my mum, because that was just too creepy, but I did find out she was a big Robbie Williams fan, which was frankly also a bit much. Yet again, I had to keep my feelings about sentimental pop mostly to myself. (I have to admit, I did have a Robbie Williams CD once, but it was stolen on 9-11…) Otherwise she was very friendly and seemed like she’d be a very good nurse.

I also met in El Alto, in between the two Fabiola excursions, the cynical, very well-informed Khantuta. I believe, based on something I stumbled on in ‘Open Veins’, but haven’t yet confirmed, that she’s named after the imperial Inca flower. Granted, this additional insight doesn’t shed any light on her personality or ideas. (It seems like Yuill has a disproportionate number of attractive female friends—some I haven’t yet met. Fabiola agreed with me that a good book could be called ‘Las amigas de Yuill’.)

Khantuta took me on a revealing tour of El Alto, from Ciudad Satelite (sp?), the middle-class enclave of El Alto where she grew up, into much more destitute parts of the city. Apparently, the real money is around Plaza 16 de Julio, where the indigenous bourgeoisie lives in outward modesty (except for some really big parties). Some of the streets of El Alto were a bit like country roads, long strips of cobble-stone with walls on either side broken up by the occasional front-door. The commercial downtown, in contrast, was completely frenzied and chaotic. I’ve read descriptions of El Alto as a shanty-city but I think the term gives you a pretty poor idea of what El Alto is like. Taking the train from Paris to the airport you see buildings in far worse shape than much of El Alto. Some of El Alto’s houses are built on wildly dangerous slopes and will collapse after a fixed number of storms, or when their structural flaws cause them to simply give out. (The inhabitants of houses build many of these homes, not anyone you would liken to a building professional.) Yet many, many parts of El Alto, if extremely poor, are not cardboard boxes covered in corrugated metal, but solid-ish brick structures. You couldn’t bulldoze El Alto out of existence. Though El Alto has certainly bulldozed its share of political leaders. (Lazy, groaner transition.)

Alongside the unions, Khantuta told me the most powerful group in El Alto was FEJUVE, a sort of city-wide neighbourhood collective that elected members from every small community into a leadership that has had an incredible ability to mobilize El Alto citizens. When a Suez subsidiary was charging over USD$100 for the installation of running water in a house, the city went up in arms. Khantuta also told me that no one gets out of the FEJUVE leadership without being corrupted. And the current water minister, as I wrote above, the former head of FEJUVE, seems to be no exception. I haven’t found anyone in Bolivia yet who thinks he’s doing a good job.

I think I’d better stop here, before you start using this blog as a cure for insomnia . I’m now in Cochabamba, where I’ve so far witnessed Semana Santa and eaten BBQ’ed beef heart.

BBC interview, medica

A solid BBC interview with Morales written up by the news guy, Paul Mason, on his blog.

Today a Cuban medico-administrator took me on a tour of a couple very rural medical centres where Cuban doctors are providing free care in communities that have never seen doctors. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to interview any patients. (It turns out they don't spend a lot of time in the centres, as they aren't used to having doctors around; the doctors are generally going to them...) So I still need to do some more on-the-ground research before hopefully talking with the ambassador, health minister, etc. I'm banking on finding more around Cocha--and some patients.

90% of the doctors are working in medical centres or medical posts, which are extremely small (a few rooms, a nurse, maybe some nursing students) and provide only primary care; this is also where they sleep. The medecine they bring is paid for by Cuba, which also pays them a food stipend. And of course, these doctors coordinate with the broader Mision Milagros (Miracle Mission) program, where Cuban doctors surgically remove cataracts, so that if someone with this problem is discovered in the middle of nowhere, s/he gets access to the free eye treatment in El Alto.

Outside a few public programs (universal care for pregnant mothers and young children), you have to pay to see the doctor in Bolivia. Unless, since early February, the doctor is Cuban. I'm told people really like that.

One tragic downside is that these poor Cubans are suffering in the cold. Though they put on a brave face.

Strikes and gutters

• Bankers (needlessly?) insist on being able to plunder Latin America according to their rules
• Puts a dent in my plan to bus through Peru to Ecuador
• School of the Americas wonders what to do with emptying lockers

Bits and pieces

Meeting a peer

I went into the store to buy a guidebook to Bolivia, and ended up with a human being who was much more interesting (though let's be honest, the book will be the more useful as soon as I leave La Paz). As is my usual m.o., I take any opportunity I have to distinguish myself from an American tourist. So when I was paying for the book, I quickly established my credentials as a Canadian and a journalist. (I tried to explain freelance, but ended up conceding that I had neither a real job nor a real employer.) One of the saleswomen requested an interview, so I asked her if she thought Bolivia's closer ties with Cuba and Venezuela were dangerous. She said they were dangerous for the American embassy. A friendship was born.

Roci­o is 23, Aymara, and is studying tourism. She's also, without knowing it, a daughter of the Enlightenment. She says she's been politically conscious since she developed the faculty of reason, says she has no religion because religions only cause wars, has a Japanese boyfriend, considers the Leninist and Maoist groups at her university irrational, and justifies being half an hour late for a rendez-vous by claiming that in Bolivia, it's only logical that 9:00 in fact mean 9:30. (I was persuaded, but wished I'd been apprised of this in advance.)

Thanks to a bizarre rental agreement I've never heard of outside Bolivia--I forget the name--she pays her landlady USD$1200, gets to live in the apartmentt for a year, and then moves out and gets the money back. Apparently this is a way for people who need to raise capital quickly to do so... And though it seems strange, I guess a tenant is better than a loan shark.

Roci­o brought me to the biggest market ever, located in El Alto, a satellitete of La Paz spread across mountains to the north of the capital. You can buy everything there, from filthy, decapitated barbies to llama fetuses. (Actually, every description of Bolivian markets I've ever found in English lists llama fetuses, so this is more of a shout-out than anything else; really though, you can buy everything. As another woman told me, it defies the imaginationin. So I challenge you, imagine ten things you couldn't buy at this market, though they can't be too enormous, obviously.)

El Alto is also the scene of fabulous discontent, and has destroyed a number of presidents recently over water privatisationon and natural gas exports. The most recent head of La Paz's confederation of neighbourhoods, a key actor in the super-powerful social movement scene, is now Bolivia's Minister of Water. His replacement is already denouncing him for selling out. Tough crowd. (El Alto only became an official municipality 20 years ago, and has since grown to being bigger than La Paz, each around 850 000, though I've read higher numbers too, on the strength of rural Aymara migrants and miners unemployed by government privatizations and mine closures in the 1980s.)

Though she's a university student who, as she puts it, depends on the gringo dollar and gets nothing from the government, Rocio's a committed Morales supporter. She has little money, lots of class consciousness, and is a big fan of Eduardo Galeano. She pointed out that if you let yourself get depressed by all the horrible things you see in Bolivia, you would die. Also, she knows where to get good street food.

As I meet more people here, I expect to write shorter portraits. (Even so, I feel like I'm already giving away key parts of as-yet unwritten freelance masterpiecesces.)


Strange and unfortunate images

In my hotel room is a charming poster with an illustration of colonial looking buildings with a nice church, in a village setting. The buildings aren't actually colonial, though, they're original. It's a tourist poster for Andalusialucia, in the south of Spain.

In a restaurant where I recently sampled delicious-esque food very cheap, with only other Bolis in sight, there was a poster of the New York City skyline. Yes, you already know where I'm going with this. The only words on the poster were, 'Twin Towers, World Trade Centre, New York City'. I'm sure it wasn't meant as a provocation.

Of course, on the trufi from El Alto back down to La Paz, there was a big sticker on one of the windows that was a stylized image of Bin Laden's face. Same zeitgeist, different message.

Bourgeois lefty intellectual wet dream

This section, given the title, is bound to be disappointing, and I reserve the right to use the title again, should more appropriate circumstances warrant it.

Anyway, the other day I walked into 'Libreria Tercer Milenio', expecting to find the same new wave books as in most La Paz bookstores. (In a book store in Santa Cruz, there was a prominently displayedated copy of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion', a less prominent but impressive stack of 'The Diary of Ann Frank' and about forty books about devilish church conspiracies. Also, lots of self-help guides and sex manual.)

I told the bookseller I was looking for a simple book about the recent history of Bolivian politics. He slapped a couple of books on the counter, a couple more, and then a couple more. I didn't know what to do. Two of them were histories of five hundred years of indigenous struggle and resistance. The man smiled shyly as I rifled through the books, trying to chose. Should I get 'Indigenous Geopolitics' or 'The Uprising of El Alto'? (Both featured similar photos on the cover.) In the end, I went with IG, which was perhaps a mistake as the book has more jargon than a fourth-year anthro course pack, and cites Foucault before the end of the first chapter. Well, it was in support of a good cause. I also picked up another academic book, and then, the biggest mistake, an illustrated Peruvian dictionary for kids, since hubris forbade me owning a Spanish-English dictionary anymore. (It's the worst dictionary ever. All definitions are circles of 2-3 words.)

When I came back a few days later to pick up a more general survey of the protest movements, and pointed to the book I wanted through the glass, he pulled it out, dropped it on the counter, gave me the same timid, goofy smile, and said, "Just that one?"

"Yes," I said, nodding sadly. He looked at me again. "Just the one?" "Yes, yes."

Two minutes later there was the exact same piles of books as the last time on the counter. I rifled through them again, but this time I determinedly insisted on just getting one. So he cleared off everything except the survey I'd already chosen and a modest, 250-page essay called "Rethinking Bolivia" that was pricier than the dictionary. I asked him if it was good, and he smiled guiltily and said yes. I got them both.

When I asked him if he read a lot, he just smiled sheepishly, so I added, "when you have a moment of spare time?" and he said yes.

I think it's the first time I've ever been in a banal revolutionary bookshop. By this I mean it wasn't run by a student co-operative, or filled with photocopied anarchist pamphlets, or otherwise self-consciously alternative. It didn't even occur to the guy to give me a right-wing book or boast that the ones he gave me were left. Pretty great.

Promises, promises

Soon, as I become informed, I will start blogging more specifically about the political situation here, and will add some Boli news and blog links, for the two of you who might be interested.

(Oh, and this is too rich. 'Blogging' and 'blog' aren't in the Blogger spellcheck.)

Turning the corner

Armed with large bottles of water and long midday lie-downs, I'm fighting back against 12,000 feet of elevation. With crooked streets flanked by narrow sidewalks at steep inclines, and all the best stuff at the top of the hills, La Paz is fighitng back. Yesterday, the city won a phyrric victory. I managed to explore all manner of Aymara markets, penetrating deep into La Paz's indigenous commercial sector, but I was generally too dehydrated and disoriented to take advantage.

Sure, every time I saw the light filtering alluringly through the coloured awnings of another row of stalls, I clambered up, lost my breath, and inspected the stuffed animals, plastic toys, or strange animal parts that were on display. Yet I missed a million opportunities to rehydrate, failed to find myself a cup of coca tea (then foolishly purchased mate de cedron--whatever that means--from two charming-looking but apparently unconversatoinal young women and burnt my mouth because I could think of nothing to say), and forgot to buy one of the grandfather-style sweaters all the locals wear. I looked longingly into miniature cafes but didn't go in, inhibited by a combination of self-consciousness, shyness, and fear of the unknown. (Not sure why that whole paragraph is written in lists of three...)

It's true that I witnessed moments of true charm--four-year.old girls throwing way too much feed at pigeons in Plaza Murillo and then snuggling up to their mothers. The daughters would be in western dress--leggings, sweaters, etc--and the mothers in more tradional indigenous garb, poofy skirts, shawls and bowler hats. Many were enjoying jello and ice cream. Of course, the same mother-daughter combination appeared much more often, and with more pathos, on busy and not-so-busy streets, some begging, some with impressive stands of candybars and trinkets, and some selling as little as little bags of lemons.

Today, my sorties were shorter but better-organized. Recognizing that La Paz's forces, at least for the moment, were better mobilized than those of my body--which thinks I invented my past as an athlete in order to taunt it--I moved strategically. I'll spare you the details and me the typing, but for a few highlights. I managed to get lunch consisting of salad, a delicious giant bowl of soup (trying to separate a chunk of meet from its bone, I splashed generous quantities onto my shirt, so I'll be able to analyze the ingredients), a couple hot-dog-style sausages over a mound of mashed potatoes, and a piece of fruit in sweetish water, all for less than a dollar. The fact that coins here weigh less than poker chips also tells you something about the strength of the local currency. This evening, I managed my first impromtu chat with a local, the owner of a cafe/bar (I had cammomille tea and sponge cake) who gave me his thoughts on life in La Paz and his hopes and fears for the new government. I look forward to more of these chats, and understanding more than 50 per cent of what's said. When I mentioned I would be looking into the aftermath of the water wars in Cochabamba, he told me the recent floods had been a real tragedy. So today was an encouraging draw.

I leave you with a quotation from the Museo de la Coca, which not surprisingly comes out heavily pro-coca and anti-cocaine. (Cleverly in tune with current government policy.) On the effects of coca:

Y al igual que el orgásmo conseguido por la masturbación, nunca es suficiente y
pierde su verdadero sentido, el orgásmo químico de la cocaína sólo crea más
deseo y al mismo tiempo aísla y deprime al individuo cuando esté despierta de su
sueño de placer y éxito artifical.

Roughly translated, "And much like the orgasm that follows masturbation, it's never sufficient and loses its feeling, the chemical orgasm of cocaine only creates more desire while at the same time it depresses the individual when he awakes from his artificial dream of pleasure."

That was by far the museum's most devastating insight.

(I'm assuming you all already know that the coca leaf isn't satan-spawn.)

The Peace, Part I

I'm liking La Paz a lot better than Caracas. Feel safe, people wearing sweaters, way fewer cars.

Also, though there is less Caribbean warmth, people seem more comfortable in their skin. Not a scientific observation, obviously.

Haven't seen any of the Evo sweaters yet, but have found the Che t-shirt sector. (Coincidentally, also where many of the tourists hang out.)